Why Retrieve the Transgressor? A Survey of Some Literary Classics

Abstract

Whether it was Tagore or Bankim in India, Flaubert in France, Rousseau of Geneva or Russian Tolstoy, the passionate transgressive woman has always caught their fancy.In bothIndian and Western works we see a similarity in the pattern of how transgression of a married woman is treated by the authors. Almost in all of them, the resolution happens via the death of the protagonist, mainly suicide chiefly on account of hopelessness with harsh attitude of the society, or a kind of self-repression out of internalised guilt. The free play of desire initially given to the women is finally curtailed by an act of fate, or change of heart of the transgressive women, which is a subject of detailed criticism. This is done in tandem to the personal comfort of the author (mainly the male writers) or out of a sense of appropriation to the society to escape its disapproval (by female authors) is what the paper tries to analyseand depict.